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Adele Sweetwood guides marketing strategy and go-to-market programs for SAS. Her responsibilities span field and digital marketing, demand generation, retention and event marketing, as well as advertising, content, search and social media. The author of The Analytical Marketer, Adele empowers 400+ marketers with data and analytics to grow revenue and optimize customer interactions.

Analytical marketing is equal parts science and art; decisions driven by data and empowered by smart marketers. Adele Sweetwood, SVP of Global Marketing and Shared Services, SAS explains how assembling an all-star team is a critical step to making analytical marketing work for your organization

Okay. You have the strategy, technology, and organizational buy-in to provide your marketing team the very best resources and support. Now, you need to make sure your team has the skills and expertise needed to fully implement your vision of a modern marketing team.

Before we began retooling our global marketing team at SAS, we took an important and necessary first step to establish a framework which guides how we presented ourselves to the market. And that, in turn, helped better define our marketing staffing requirements. We call this our “go-to-market” framework. This framework aligns with our corporate initiatives and includes:

Revenue and growth marketing

Retention and loyalty marketing

Regional or business unit go-to-market requirements

This change in how we implement our marketing also changed our view of team roles. In the past, we expected a marketer to be an expert in every aspect of campaign implementation and management including social media strategy, content creation, lead generation and event preparation. We believed that they needed to know everything about the product or solution they were building a campaign around.

Good marketing, like good music, is better with a conductor

You can see the problem with that approach. Given the complexities and variability involved with all the different channels we were expected to maintain; it didn’t make sense for our marketers to be good at everything. Instead, we decided our go-to market leaders should be more like the conductor of an orchestra. This orchestration role requires someone who understands the various skills and expertise of the team members around them and know when to pull them in at the moments they’re needed to make the campaign a success.

The concept of the orchestrator evolved from the idea that it would be great to have someone who had a view of the entire organization and who could help connect the dots. An orchestrator on a go-to-market team needs access to channel- and product-specific experts from within the organization to help build campaign. Orchestrators also needs to access other resources like our external communications and public relations teams as well as our corporate creative team, which serves as our in-house creative resource.

In a digital marketing department you need specialists and someone to bring them all together. The marketer will know their topic well, but they are also at the center of bringing in the right people to build the best go-to market program.

As our functional needs changed, so have roles and job descriptions. A focus on data science combined with the proliferation of new channels has radically changed some traditional marketing jobs and has led to the creation of new roles. These changes are an evolution from marketing as art to a hybrid of art and science. As part of this evolutionary process, we’ve created four job categories.

Digital marketer: Using data to optimize outcomes no matter the channel

Digital marketing includes web, search, social, email, and digital advertising and media buying. These functional areas have been going through tremendous growth and change over the past decade as the number of channels have exploded. Every organization’s reaction has been pretty much the same – add channel specialists who would learn every nuance of how that channel operated.

There continues to be a need for skillsets that are deep and focused, but you also need people who can connect those skills with a broader strategic view the organization’s goals. You can’t have someone be so focused on their one social channel that they don’t recognize that they are cannibalizing another channel at the same time. We are looking for people who have commanding expertise on a channel while clearly understanding how that channel intersects with other channels.

The vital ingredient for this digital marketing approach is data. One of our marketers likened the data wrangling he does to being a police detective uncovering the truth. And that’s what we expect our marketers to do; use readily available data to enhance campaign performance or even to end a campaign when the analysis shows that the results don’t justify the cost.

Content marketer: Identifying the best content for every stage of the customer journey

Content is now the currency of marketing. You can attach a cost to its creation and a value to the results it garners. Everything we do involves some form of content and that content is all over the place – literally and figuratively. But the content has to be channel appropriate – meaning that the format, length, and relevancy must fit that channel. You cannot offer a 20-minute video in a display ad. Well, you can, but no one will watch it.

The content marketer’s job is to spot content gaps and help ensure we are offering the kind of relevant content our customers are looking for. The content marketer is always looking for ways to use, reuse and repurpose our best quality content so that a piece of content puts it best foot forward as it gets used across different channels.

That means our content marketers need to have a very good understanding of all of our channels, how they function, and how they complement each other. They also need to assess what content types works at different stages of the customer journey: when do customers prefer white papers, videos, or a book? Content marketers need to be analytically-driven and behave as consultants on marketing campaigns to provide top-rated content for multiple channels.

A new job title you might have noticed cropping up is marketing data scientist. On our team, we’re still defining the roles and responsibilities that fall under that umbrella term. For now, SAS has two roles:

Data visualization analyst (also sometimes referred to as data artist or data storyteller). These are the people that use diverse data sources and the latest tools for data visualization to help shape new campaigns or provide recommendations to faltering ones. Their job is to look at the data objectively and illustrate for the team what stories the data is telling and, most importantly, without being tainted or biased by what a campaign manager might want to see. Marketing data scientists are also able to report what happens when we make changes and tweaks.

Segmentation analyst. If you need help building a contact list that targets the most receptive audience, the segmentation analyst is your go-to person. A segmentation analyst relies on scoring models to determine the key factors in a contact database that might make that person a good target for the campaign. They also track results of the campaign and offer advice about how to optimize the outcome.

Outbound marketing is not our team’s sole focus. We place an equal emphasis on inbound marketing because in the modern customer decision journey, outbound and inbound are inextricably connected. Customer engagement specialists are what we call the people tasked with creating more meaningful conversations with customers and potential customers to reach out to us with questions.

A major change we’ve made is rethinking the talent and skills we need at our customer contact center. That contact center is itself an evolutionary advancement from the traditional call center because we now respond in many more ways than answering a telephone.

Analytics plays a role here, too, in providing the customer engagement specialists with distilled information in real time about customers, without drowning them in data. And these customer interactions, hundreds each day, provide us with massive volume of online chat transcripts which we analyze using text analytics for sentiment analysis. The customer engagement specialists can use the sentiment analysis better identify emerging issues and have an opportunity to turn what could have been a negative interaction into a more positive one. We call it relationship marketing.

Our result is a pitch perfect team

Our goal is to hire marketers who have a passion for and understand the value of data and analytics in decision making. Since implementing this team structure it has struck a chord with individual marketers who enjoy learning and growing within their specialty. Its boosted creativity and innovation, not killed it.